The future of GNOME - an interesting subject. GNOME 3 has been out and about for a while, and it hasn't exactly been a smashing success. One of the efforts to take GNOME to the next level is what the team refers to as GNOME OS - but in reality, it's a set of improvements to GNOME that are just as interesting to GNOME-the-desktop-environment.

Example: The absolute insistence of making the "cashew" impossible to hide or remove shows very clearly that they are completely out of touch with what their own users want.

Impossible? In this moment I don't see the cashew in my desktop. What have I done?
1) make sure that the widgets are unlocked.
2) move the "corner cashew" until is "under" the main panel.
3) lock the widgets.